[Review] Sapphire Radeon HD6670

Sapphire has sent us an interesting sample this time and honestly not much was expected. Considering the competition from both NVidia, as well as many offerings with the same graphics processing unit (GPU) from other vendors, we assumed this would be an average card, considering its single-slot, low-profile cooling. It did not work out that way. Though the AMD HD6670 is considered a minimalist GPU in the standard arena it is a bang for the growing small form factor computer (SFF) segment. So is it better than the competition? Let us see…

Technical Stuff

Output

1 x D-Sub(VGA)
1 x Dual-Link DVI
1 x HDMI 1.4a

GPU

800 MHz Core Clock
40 nm Chip
480 x Stream Processors

Memory

1024 MB Size
128 -bit GDDR5
4000 MHz Effective

Dimension

190(L)x62(W)x23(H) mm mm Size.

Software

Driver CD

D-Sub(VGA)The 15-pin VGA connector is common to most monitors and high definition television.

Dual-Link DVI

Equipped with the most popular Dual Link DVI (Digital Visual Interface), this card is able to display resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600 at 60Hz.

Get intense gaming performance and unrivaled image quality with stunning 3D visual effects, realistic lighting and lifelike imagery with SAPPHIRE graphics cards supporting DirectX®11. New features in DirectX®11, such as Hardware Tesselation, HDR Texture Compression, Multi-threading support and DirectCompute bring lifelike gaming and an experience never possible on a PC before.

Supports the latest Shader Model 5.0 feature set including VTF (Vertex Texture Fetch) which is a key feature used extensively in many of the games that ship today. Without support for this feature the game will fall back to a lesser shader path resulting in the loss of cool, lifelike effects made possible by Shader Model 5.0

AMD Catalyst Control Center™

The AMD Catalyst Control Center™ software application gives you complete control over the performance and visual quality of your SAPPHIRE AMD Radeon™ based graphics card allowing for the best experience on your PC.

AMD PowerPlay™

Dynamically manage power efficiency and take control of your performance with AMD’s revolutionary AMD PowerPlay[tm] power management technology, delivering high performance features when needed and conserving power when the demand on the graphics processor is low. This seamless technology dramatically reduces the overall power consumption allowing for break-through energy efficiency.

Enhanced Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD 3)

Watch the hottest Blu-ray movies or other HD content at full 1080p (and beyond !) display resolution. Enjoy a feature rich video experience with enhanced Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD 3), offloading the bulk of the video decoding tasks from the CPU to the GPU allowing for a cooler, quieter and more balanced system.

Enhanced Internet Browser Applications

Not just for video and games, the power of your GPU can now accelerate the latest versions of some Internet browsers (IE9/Mozzilla FireFox) utilizing Direct 2D rendering for a faster and more responsive browsing experience including high quality image rendering and media playback.

Microsoft Office 2010

Take advantage of improved picture and media editing capabilities in Office 2010 as well as edit and share your content in real time.

See more, and get more done. Enhanced productivity with accelerated GPU processing for Office applications.

Windows® 7 support

WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) Certified drivers and logos are available for all SAPPHIRE HD2000, HD3000, HD4000 and HD5000 series cards ensuring compatibility and reliability with Microsoft Windows 7.

AMD App Acceleration

Use the power of your AMD Radeon™ GPU to speed up everyday applications like your web browser and Microsoft Office 2010 using AMD App Acceleration. Do more, and do it faster. Watch Blu-ray movies, online streaming video and other HD content using your AMD Radeon™ GPU and get smooth – high quality playback with amazing image quality.

There is really nothing special in the package and the software is just a basic driver package with what is needed to get one up and running. Considering all the bells and whistles that the Catalyst Control Center includes the only real addition that could be considered necessary is a DVI to D-Sub adapter.